Sadley Bradley

Me, for the last twenty-four hours.

Tue, 14 May 2013 15:40:12 -0600

Me, for the last twenty-four hours.

I love the Muppets. This is my preferred interpretation of the Muppets, and it’s the reason I...

Sat, 27 Apr 2013 18:30:39 -0600

I love the Muppets.

This is my preferred interpretation of the Muppets, and it’s the reason I try to watch them with my niece when I have the chance. Frankly, I think “Failure will happen, but that doesn’t mean you need to quit trying” makes for a better and more realistic lesson for kids than “You WILL succeed and you CAN do whatever you want.”

I mean, “Rainbow Connection” is this. It’s saying, “Hey, we know that sometimes people fail. Not everyone gets what they want. And some things are legitimately lost causes. But we aren’t discouraged. We still have hope.” Hell, the most recent movie ends with a total and unequivocal non-success, which is almost unheard of for a kid’s movie. I think the lessons learned from watching the Muppets are a million times more valuable than almost any Disney fare.

I love the Muppets.

My Love/Hate Relationship With Asymmetrical Multiplayer Games, or: A Story of Self-Improvement

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 18:30:34 -0600

I love playing games against other people. I really do. I love the fact that an activity I enjoy can be a social activity as well. You can’t say that about every activity (though, to be fair, you can say it about a lot of things).

Specifically, though, I love asymmetrical multiplayer games. By “asymmetrical,” I mean games that 1) offer flexibility in how you approach the game before even sitting down to play it, and 2) don’t allow players to have perfect information. So most board games don’t fit this definition, as most tend to rely on openness of information, and they also often ensure that each player starts in the same way. And though there are board games that allow you to choose different parameters for each player (like Twilight Imperium or Talisman or something where you’re choosing a race/class to play at the beginning), those games are still typically very open with information.

But once you start hiding information from other players, that makes your game about a million times more interesting. Suddenly, I’m questioning every move you make. In the Battlestar Galactica game, as soon as it hits the point where there’s a guaranteed Cylon player, it completely changes the dynamic of the game. In The Resistance, I start to wonder who is bluffing and who is really on my side. Imperfect information is such a game-changer (literally) that it sort of blows my mind that more board games don’t embrace it. It makes learning a part of every game, and I dig that.

The games that do this best are collectible card games. Not only do I have imperfect information during the game (“I wonder what he has in his hand”), I have imperfect information when I sit down to play (“I wonder what kind of deck he has built”). I think this is a huge part of the popularity of trading card games — there’s the notion that you’re crafting your deck, which gives you a huge amount of mental and emotional investment right from the start. There’s also the fact that you can be “tricky” on many different levels; maybe you build a deck crafted specifically to beat a certain other popular deck, or maybe you try to mind-game your opponent to make him think you have a different plan than you do.

Of course, videogames have been doing this basically forever. When two people are looking at different screens, it’s easy to ensure which player sees what information. This has really been one of the fundamental things about shooters — your radar doesn’t show the enemy unless certain conditions are met. The fact that you don’t have perfect information drives a lot of your decisions in a shooter. Do you go down a less-traveled path to avoid the enemy as you run to the flag? Do you lie in wait along the main road to try and set an ambush? Without knowing what the enemy is up to, these decisions have weight and consequences, which make the decisions much more fulfilling when they are the correct ones (and less devastating when they are incorrect).

This might make it sound like I unequivocally love asymmetrical play. And, I mean, I do. But for me, it can sometimes also be a horribly frustrating time. Why? Because the onus is on you if you fail, but not many players want to admit that, nor is it always readily apparent.

Let’s go way back in time to two-and-a-half years ago, when I was really into Magic. I played at the small-time competitive level every week. But in the almost-a-year that I did that, I never took first place. It wasn’t due to lack of card selection — my job allowed me to indulge myself on practically whatever I wanted. It also wasn’t due to some kind of skill gap between me and other players — there was a skill gap, but it was more of a creek than a river. My problem was that I refused to see that I was the problem or that there were things I could do to improve. I blamed every loss on lucky draws, a bad matchup, the fact that I was tired… basically, everything but myself.

So it was frustrating when I lost, because I literally had no idea why. All of the factors I was blaming were factors that I had no control over. It was a double-edge sword. While I was freeing myself from any accountability about improving myself, I was also constructing a scenario in which it was impossible for me to improve.

Once I took a step back and did some reading, though, I started to change how I thought about things. After every loss, I thought about what I had done wrong and how I could avoid it in the future. And just like that, all of these areas of improvement were suddenly highlighted. I suddenly had a path I could follow to get better. I could change my deck to be a little less linear! I could pay closer attention to the local metagame! I could try and get better reads on my opponents! With all of these options for improvement, how could I not improve?

I was quick to forget those lessons a year later, though, when I started playing Starcraft. Starcraft is a lot like Magic, in that you have beforehand preparation — a build order, racial matchup strategies, and so on — player skill, and hidden information. So when I started playing Starcraft, I was quick to blame the same things for losses, although my excuses got more creative — “That guy must have just tanked his way to Bronze League despite being a Master League player”, “There’s just no way to counter six pool as Protoss”, and the like. It wasn’t until I turned inward that I saw improvement. Shore up my build orders. Get visibility on the map to have better information. Learn what does what.

This is a lot of words, more than I usually write, but here’s the tee-ell-dee-arr lesson that playing card games and videogames taught me. Life is an asymmetrical multiplayer game. When I sit down to play it — by dealing with a difficult peer, starting a tough project, getting in shape, going to the supermarket, or whatfuckingever — sometimes, I will fail in my endeavors. The solution to my failures is not to blame the other players, the hand life dealt me, or any other factor beyond my control. Instead, the path to self-improvement consists of preparation, adaptation, skill, and education. With those things, and a willingness to put my ego aside, the game of life becomes much more pleasant, and I can be better as a result.

Bioshock, Starcraft, and Depression

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 18:30:51 -0600

Most of the past few weeks have consisted of my self-medicating with Starcraft and whiskey. I kind of wish I could get depressed in the winter months like a normal person. Actually, ideally, I wouldn’t get depressed at all, but apparently that’s anathema to my brain, so you know, whatever. In my case, though, the sun comes out, events start going on, and my natural instinct is to wall myself off from the rest of humanity

Bioshock Infinite was really good. It reminded me of Inception a little bit. It’s a big, dumb blockbuster piece of media that has a lot of subtle things going on underneath the surface. Unfortunately, much like Inception, the fact that the Internet is a thing means that Bioshock Infinite got “solved” pretty quickly. Fifteen years ago, when we were only getting “videogame talk” every month thanks to magazines, this game would have kept us occupied for months, and we’d be looking forward to new issues of PSM or whatever to see what people were saying about it, or talking to people at school about it. But a couple of weeks after its release, we’ve gotten it mostly figured out, and so there’s no reason to really pore over it any more. It might be great to revisit when new DLC is added, depending on what that looks like.

I don’t mean to sound bittersweet about it. I really loved it. I think it did a lot of design things right (even if it did a few storytelling things wrong). I’m trying to sell everyone I know on it because it’s one of those things that people can talk about. “Did you see that part?” “What vigors were you using?” “What do you think about the end?” It’s a neat human thing that we can talk about shared experiences. And in this age of quick transfer of information, it’s doubly heartbreaking and isolating when we don’t have the opportunity to talk about those experiences. The conversation between me and my roommate has gone like this:

Me: “Hey, you should play Bioshock Infinite. It’s really good and kind of a mindfuck. It’d be cool to have someone to talk to about it.”
Him: “Yeah, I would, but….. Diablo.”

It’s not even necessarily that I’m bummed at not having someone to talk videogames with. It’s more that I need something to occupy my excess mental space and creative energy. In the past, that thing has been Magic, or school, or girlfriend, or fraternity, or music. But ultimately, it just serves as something that I can spend time thinking about. Which is necessary for me, because if left to my own devices, my thoughts inevitably get occupied by the same self-deprecating crap I’ve been dealing with for like the last fifteen years.

Hence Starcraft. It was my first and longest-running multiplayer love. The Protoss sound effects are permanently etched onto my cerebral cortex. And hey, it turns out that there’s a mature and well-established community of people to talk with about strategy, design, matchups, builds, and so on. With this perfect storm of nostalgia, designthink, and constant conversation, it’s really no surprise or question that I’d gravitate toward it.

And so I have. And now, my mind is full of build orders and counters and pylons and mothership cores and ladders, on top of work and family and everything else, and it’s great to be occupied with so much at once.

Photo

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 18:39:54 -0600

Watching Louis CK and Game of Thrones while drinking 120-proof whiskey is a good cure for a long...

Sun, 21 Apr 2013 19:59:09 -0600

Watching Louis CK and Game of Thrones while drinking 120-proof whiskey is a good cure for a long couple of weeks at work. And also for crippling loneliness.

It's Garage Sale Time

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:47:43 -0600

This week in the Steele and Associated Households, we’re putting on a garage sale. This being the first garage sale my family has had since I moved out, it’s the big opportunity I have to get rid of my Stuff.

I culled most of it when I was moving out, but it really started to wear me down emotionally. Imagine the following scenario, writ four hundred times:

“Hmm. Here’s this thing. I remember how happy I was when my mom/my dad/Marissa/my grandparents gave it to me. I should pack it away.

“But wait. It’s not like I use it or even think about it anymore. It literally exists only as a device to trigger nostalgia and make me remember times that are bittersweet because while things were happier I also understand that those times are never coming back.

“But what if I run into my mom/my dad/Marissa/my grandparents and they bring it up or ask me if I remember it? It’d be really awkward if I had to tell them that I threw it away.

“Odds of that happening are pretty slim. I probably don’t need to worry about it.”

It was an extremely arduous process.

But now I have another chance to try and get rid of all of my stuff. Ideally, I’d be getting rid of every single thing that doesn’t exist in my house right now. But there are some things (mostly books) that I really just can’t bear to part with but don’t have room for.

So my weekend was spent putting price tags on memories. I would be marking up games, and each one triggered something: the ending cutscene, a snippet of gameplay, a review I read about it. I marked up CDs, and every single one reminded me of the first time I heard it, the shopping experience I had while buying it, the meaningful experiences I shared with others while listening to it. Gifts from my past called to mind the givers: lovers, friends, dead family members.

Not only was it a physically tiring day, on account of moving boxes and shit, but it was mentally tiring, as I relived all of the high and low points of my adolescent life in the span of, like, eight hours.

I did give my little brother some old games, though. I’m excited for him to get a taste of what videogames were like before he was born (and after I made that realization, I felt so old). Actually, that reminds me that I need to write about my Big Brothers Big Sisters Experience sometime. I should get on that.

Why I Play Girls in Videogames

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 18:30:52 -0600

I think I’ve played as a female character in every game that has given me the option since Fallout 3. I’ve never really been sure why.

(Before we get too far into this, I want to make it clear that it’s NOT because “If I’m going to stare at the back of a character for ten hours, I’d rather it be a hot chick.” I find that to be a little creepy and along the same lines as dudes who spent way too much time trying to get juuuust the right camera angle to ogle Lara Croft in the original Tomb Raider).

In the vast majority of RPGs (since that’s generally the genre that lets you pick a gender for your character), gender is entirely aesthetic. There’s no gameplay advantage to choosing one over the other. You just get a different model and maybe voice. So why, then, do I trend away from choosing a character that is most representative of myself?

(I’ll just preempt the suggestion that I do it out of some misplaced sense of gender, or because I have some predilection for gender-play, or because I identify more with women. I’m pretty sure it’s none of those).

One reason I play videogames is for escapism. Ultimately, it’s the same reason I listen to music or read comics or watch movies. RPGs in particular offer a very unique sort of escapism, since they allow me to, well, play a role. They allow me to actually act like someone else with a different ethical system, approach to problem solving, or, yes, gender. So I guess it makes a weird sort of sense that when given the opportunity, I generally want to play as my polar opposite: a badass chick.

Also, I think it’s just generally more interesting to see a female as the hero of something because they don’t get nearly as much spotlight as males do in gaming culture. Is that reverse sexism? Maybe, but it doesn’t really change that I think it’s a lot more awesome to see Maya the Siren or Commander Rosaley Shepard kicking butt instead of Carbon Copy Action Game Protagonist #30.

Photo

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:05:43 -0600

Photo

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:32:34 -0600

Madre de Diablo

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 18:30:45 -0600

I played a lot of Diablo 3 last week, due to the fact that everyone else in my house just picked it up. Also, I was sick, and there aren’t a lot of mindless tasks one can do from a bed for two days.

It was actually refreshing. I played it when it first came out and then forgot about it for nearly a year. I took to it again with gusto, and it was nice to see that I can sometimes shut off the academic “let’s pay attention to the game design” part of my brain and just play a game.

I don’t personally understand the amount of hate leveled at Diablo 3. It’s not Diablo 2, but come on. It was never going to be. The days of the hack-and-slash RPG have come and gone. We had the golden age already, and now the best we can hope for is virtuous tributes. It’s not like the other entrants in the genre have fared much better. How many people are still playing Torchlight 2? How is Path of Exile doing? Everyone is looking for the savior of the hack-and-slash genre, but its time is over.

Diablo 3 is a fine game. It’s not pants-droppingly amazing, but it’s good. It has Blizzard’s characteristic bad writing on display, but the minute-to-minute gameplay feels and plays well. Internet people just need to learn to cool their jets.

Treefortin'

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 19:18:00 -0600

There’s something funny that happens when you hold an event that attracts all of the hip twentysomethings in the area. You get lots of people running into exes or trying to avoid running into exes for four straight days. And it’s hilarious, at least from a misanthropic point of view.

(Although, I did happily manage to avoid awkwardly running into the girl I dated last summer, despite seeing her seriously everywhere).

Starcraft 2: Total Eclipse of the Heart of the Swarm

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 22:15:13 -0600

It was my intent to move right into Bioshock 2 after finishing the first game, but I can’t go more than twenty minutes without a crash. So until I figure that out, I’ve decided to distract myself with Starcraft.

I don’t know if there’s something in the water at Blizzard, but they have lately been very consistently putting out some of the most execrable writing I have ever seen. Seriously, it’s like everyone in the company collectively forgot how to tell stories, but they were too proud to, like, take a class or something.

I mean, Jesus, this is some bad stuff. I’ll probably go into it later. But what blows my mind (and has since Wings of Liberty) is the whole Raynor-Kerrigan romance being the impetus for now two games-worth of campaigns.

Let me break down this romance for you. Jim Raynor met Sarah Kerrigan in the first Starcraft. He flirted with her, and she was all like “whatever” about his advances. They had three missions together before Kerrigan was eaten by bugs, except she really just got mind-controlled and became their queen. As the Queen of the Zerg, she spent the next two and two-thirds games waging war against the universe, double-crossing every other character, and slaughtering like a million people. Despite this, Raynor feels the need to chase Kerrigan across the galaxy for years.

Let’s review that. Based on his interaction with this woman over the course of THREE MISSIONS, Raynor spends YEARS chasing her down while she merrily murders everyone she comes across. Years. Based on three missions. I mean, come on. I get that people do idiotic things for love, but even Romeo at least got his rocks off with Juliet a few times before their double suicide.

It didn’t bother me THAT much in Brood War and Wings of Liberty because all we had was Raynor’s side of the story. We never heard what Kerrigan thought about it all. Unfortunately, we find out during the first few missions of Heart of the Swarm that SHE’S TOTALLY INTO IT. Just like that, despite having no memory of her time as the Zerg queen (that is to say, like the last five years), Kerrigan is back in Raynor’s arms, truly madly deeply in love. Those three missions must have been pretty amazing, huh?

This probably isn’t the game’s biggest storytelling problem, but it really sticks out to me. I’m no writer, but when you’re already having a tough time developing your characters, maybe you shouldn’t hang their motivation on the flimsiest romantic premise this side of Stephanie Meyer’s books.

Bioshockin', Part Last

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 18:30:37 -0600

I always find moral choice systems in games fascinating. At least, until I pull back the veil a little and realize how limited most of them really are.

Let’s look at Bioshock. There’s a really simple morality system here: when you come across a Little Sister, you either kill her or let her go. This ticks your invisible Morality Meter up or down, and you get an appropriate ending that reflects your choices. Except not really. See, the endings are so extremely binary that there’s actually no logical connection between your actions and what happens in the endings.

If you save the girls, then it’s assumed that you rescue all of them from Rapture, take them to the surface, and raise them as your own daughters. If you kill all of them, then it’s assumed that you greedily take control of the city (and a few nuclear missiles). Regardless of which ending you get, that’s a lot of speculation on the game’s part. Insert the Will Ferrell “That escalated quickly” .gif here.

These kind of binary morality systems don’t allow for any nuance whatsoever. What if I wanted to spare all of the Little Sisters but didn’t want to be responsible for them on the surface? What if I killed all of them but just wanted to get back to my old brainwashed life? There’s no middle ground here. You’re choosing between Jesus and Satan. Optimus Prime and Megatron. Santa Claus and Hitler.

(Though, to be fair, Bioshock is basically ALL ABOUT one-dimensional absolutists imposing their will on the city of Rapture and the conflicts that arise as a result. So if pressed, I’d be willing to give it a pass in that regard).

The Mass Effect series, even though it does involve a binary good/evil system, is infinitely more interesting because there are so many choices that you can wring a lot of nuance out of it. The third game in particular does it well; your moral actions, regardless of whether they are good or evil, all contribute to your overall “reputation,” which is what triggers your Charm options in conversation. So you can be well-known but still be, say, 77% Good and 23% Evil. That’s better, but there’s no need for the game itself to judge your actions.

The best way to deal with morality is just to deliver consequences to the player based on their actions. I will always love Alpha Protocol because it takes this approach. There are a lot of moral choices in the game. Kill or spare this person. Sneak through the level or gun everyone down. Seduce the female lead or just be friends. These are moral choices, but there isn’t necessarily a “good” choice and a “bad” one.

Instead, the game doesn’t make any judgment on your actions and just makes you deal with the consequences. You snuck through that level instead of killing everyone? Well, they shot down your helicopter and your pilot’s dead now. You killed Bad Dude X instead of sparing him? Well, now he doesn’t help you later on. I’m a fan of any game that can make the morally good choice the “technically incorrect” one.

Refreshingly, it does seem like developers are starting to drift away from binary choice systems like the one in Bioshock. So in most ways, Bioshock is a little artifact from the past, like it’s saying “Remember back when it used to be groundbreaking to give you two endings based on your really obvious moral choices? Those were the days.” And then it chugs a beer and tries to hit on chicks half its age, but they wise up and aren’t interested in Bioshock, and then Bioshock just winds up going home alone, bitching about how kids these days don’t even respect their elders or understand where they came from, and as the cabbie drops Bioshock off at home, Bioshock passes out on its living room floor and drifts off to sleep, thinking about Knights of the Old Republic and Fable and all of the good times they used to have with their ham-handed morality systems, back when the current generation of systems was young and the world was laid bare before them.

That… went to kind of a weird place.

Later: Bioshock 2 and/or Starcraft 2: Zerg of the Zerg.

Bioshockin', Part 2

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 18:30:35 -0600

Bioshock does this thing where about halfway through the game, you stop seeing new things. By this point, the game has given you all of the tools it’s going to give you, and it’s shown you all of the enemies you’re going to see. This is where the imaginative gameplay that I enjoyed throughout the first half of the game turns into a tedious slog for about the last third.

See, you have all of your tools, and you don’t see any new enemies, but the game still ratchets up the difficulty by stacking extra health and damage onto the enemies as you get closer to the end. This is one of the most boring ways to add challenge to something. Every single fight plays out the same way during the last third of the game; the only difference is that I need to hit a guy twenty times with my wrench instead of fifteen.

It’s like they had one or two ideas of how to do things and then just stopped having ideas altogether. During the entire game, Bioshock likes to do this: “Oh yeah, your next objective is right down this hallway. Yep, just keep going. Just a little further now HAHA SUCKER J/K NOW YOU’RE LOCKED BEHIND A DOOR AND HAVE TO FIND THE DRAGONBALLS TO GET OUT.” It’s like doing the hundred-meter dash, except every ten meters, someone picks you up and moves you into the bleachers and demands that you walk back to the track before you can continue.

Now, this isn’t always a bad thing. It’s actually a really effective, natural way to introduce new objectives to the player. The problem in Bioshock is that this is seriously the ONLY trick it seems to have, and it completely kills the pacing at the end. Once you actually see and start chasing Fontaine, the player is engaged and excited. “Finally, I get to take this guy down,” you’re thinking.

“Nope,” the game says. “You need to get thirty MacGuffins and stuff them into a MacGuffin box and throw it into Mount MacGuffin.” And then the game grinds to a halt while you trudge on through the same enemies. I still like Bioshock overall, but it gets tremendously unexciting during the home stretch, when it should be commanding my complete attention.

Bioshockin'

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:31:09 -0600

I am excited for Bioshock Infinite. So excited, in fact, that I’m replaying the other two games. There’s no real reason for my doing this — they aren’t really related to the new game, other than sharing similar gameplay elements. But I thought it’d be fun to see how the series has evolved.

Actually, to confess, I’m sort of a bad Bioshock player. I brute-forced my way through the first game like some meathead Call of Duty fan, and I didn’t get as much out of it as others did. Let me describe what my first playthrough was like:

“Okay, this electricity power seems pretty cool. UGH it drains my mana so fast and I can’t find any of those blue things. Guess I’ll have to use my guns. Alright, that splicer took ten shots to kill. Jesus, why am I out of ammo? Fuck, I guess I’ll run to the end of the level. Damn, that turret killed me. It’d probably be easier to just reload…”

That went on for the entire duration of the game.

Fast-forward to today. I’ve got a lot less going on these days, so I feel less rushed about, well, everything, videogames included. So this time around, I’m taking a more leisurely approach. I hack turrets and cameras to let them do some work for me. I use plasmids effectively. I’m less concerned with the mad dash through the game. I’m drinking in the atmosphere, the backstory. It’s a much better way to absorb the game.

One of my favorite parts of Bioshock is all of the objectivist, anarchist, and rebellious rhetoric that gets thrown around. It’s so full of gravitas and such a delight to listen to. Give me a recording of Andrew Ryan spouting off lines from the cutting room floor of The Fountainhead, and I’d be a happy dude.

An interesting thing I noticed about the writing. I don’t think that any two people in the game have a conversation with each other. Everyone only talks to you. The entire script is really just a long series of speeches and diary entries. Which is totally perfect for a world derived from the convergence of different political ideals. Some people probably don’t have the same tolerance for it as I do, but I love listening to the people talk in this game. You’ve got Andrew Ryan talking about how a man is entitled to the sweat of his brow, then you’ve got Tenenbaum talking about mercy and guilt, and then you’ve got Sander Cohen talking about art and beauty. It’s a game where all of the major players spend most of their time pontificating, and I’m into that.

Tomb Raider, Part Last

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 09:57:00 -0600

These are a few more things I like about Tomb Raider:

It Rewards Exploration

This one seems like a no-brainer. You are playing an explorer, on an island with tons of little nooks and crannies to hide things. It’d be the easiest thing for Crystal Dynamics to just power you through the setpieces to get to the game’s conclusion, but instead, they hid a whole bunch of stuff all over the island for you to find. There are journals, artifacts, tombs, maps, weapon parts, secret challenges, and little GPS things that I don’t really understand.

And what’s your reward for collecting these things? Well, you get concept art and a model viewer, which are cool and all. But the game also rewards you with experience and salvage for going out of your way to get these things. One of my big hang-ups with exploring in most games is that there’s no point. Either the developer hasn’t bothered to hide things for me to find, or the rewards are so paltry that it feels like a waste of time. But in Tomb Raider? I probably got a third of my skill points from finding hidden crap. And I had a great time doing it, because…

The Moment-to-Moment Running and Jumping Feels and Plays Great

I made the comment the other day that if the Assassin’s Creed protagonists handled as well as Lara Croft does, then I’d probably love those games. The titular Assassins have too much weight to them, too much heft. Sure, they jump around on buildings and stuff, but they’re lumbering and… “heavily graceful,” like an elephant that is also a master at ballet.

Compare this to Lara Croft, who vaults all over the landscape, climbing, running, and zip lining like it’s no big deal. This is a huge reason why exploration is so fun. Because Lara is a fun character to play as. I love it when a developer nails the immaterial “feel” of a character.

It’s The Little Details

When Lara walks down a path that runs along a cliff, she puts her hand out to steady herself against the wall. When she gets a bad injury, it stays there for the rest of the game. She’s dirty when she roots around in a tomb, and she’s washed clean when it rains. Her piecemeal upgrades to her weapons are reflected on the model (I particularly liked the keyring bow trigger). There’s so much attention to little details, and I can really appreciate that.

Aaaand, here’s some things I don’t really like.

Whitman is Really Underdeveloped as a Character

Whitman is the famous researcher that assembles the whole crew together. It’s painfully obvious that he’s bad news (“Yeah, the bad guys just let me walk around once they realized I didn’t care they had kidnapped the rest of you!”), but literally everyone just ignores his really shady behavior. His motivations for his inevitable betrayal are basically reduced to a throwaway line delivered thirty seconds before he gets naginata’d to death.

There are a couple of journals that mention how he’s going to use the discovery of the island to get a bunch of exploring awards and stuff, but I also read the prologue comic, which is much richer with material. Whitman could have been a really sympathetic pseudovillain; his wife has left him and taken most of his artifacts, he’s proud but was forced to rely on aid to get his expedition going, and he’s dealing with the fact that, in the eyes of popular culture, his profession is less and less relevant.

Instead, he gets barely any development and dies unceremoniously.

Some of the Shooting Sequences Feel Like They Only Exist to Pad the Length of the Game

This only happens in a few places, but there are some hallways and rooms where guys just keep spawning and running in. Not so terrible, but there were a few times when I assumed I had killed everyone and moved forward, only to find two or three enemies spawning ten feet behind me out of thin air. It’s really immersion-breaking and sort of a cheap tactic.

And that’s it for Tomb Raider. I loved it.

Later: Revisiting Bioshock

Tomb Raider, Part 2

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 05:28:20 -0600

Tomb Raider ‘13 is a reboot of the franchise. Its chief concern is showing us how Lara Croft: Student of History becomes Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. It’s a story that could have turned out really poorly. But Crystal Dynamics tapped, of all people, Terry Pratchett’s daughter Rhianna to write the game, and so we get a cohesive arc that sees Lara change over the course of the main story’s ten-or-so hours.

The big theme is survival. Sometimes the game slaps you in the face with this (see the “A SURVIVOR IS BORN” text that weirdly shows up on the screen just before the credits), and sometimes the game is a little more subtle about it (see Mathias’s journal entries). Lara starts out as a more-or-less normal person. She’s not the Indiana Jones-esque figure from the PS1 era. She’s not sure that everything’s going to work out. She spends most of the game just fighting to stay alive. Survival is the catalyst for Lara’s gradual change from a wide-eyed idealist to a hardened realist.

There are several moments in the game where Lara’s ideals are put up against her will to live. She, like most other humans, is icked out by killing animals. But when it becomes her only option to survive? Lara is smart; she bucks up and does it. She doesn’t want to kill her captors the first (second?) time she’s taken captive. But she very quickly realizes that these people don’t have any qualms with killing her, so she kills her captors. She survives.

The storytelling is also economical enough to understand that we don’t need a five- or ten-minute cutscene where Lara agonizes over the fact that she just killed a person for the first time. She has a minor freakout, but once she remembers that she’s in the middle of an enemy camp, she steels herself and gets ready to fight her way out. She survives.

It’s worth noting, too, that this isn’t just the Lara Croft Show. There’s a list of supporting characters that are each developed at least a little bit through the cutscenes and a lot more through discovered journal entries. They help drive the story, mostly due to Lara’s strong moral imperative to make sure they all get rescued together. But they also shape Lara. One of the best scenes in the game is when Lara goes to the shipwreck to get tools and rescue Alex the Tech Guy. Alex gets a boatload of character development that puts his earlier scenes in a new context, and Lara’s ideals get tested yet again. She survives.

Lara’s arc ends when she makes good on her ideals. She rescues her best friend. Everyone who is still alive gets to escape. But there’s this little nod to classic Tomb Raider at the very end. It’s like the game is saying, “We’re here now.” This is Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. This is what shaped the world’s greatest archaeologist. She has fought to save herself and her friends.

And she has survived.

Tomb Raider, Part 1

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:18:00 -0600

One of things that impresses me most about the new Tomb Raider is its maturity level. Lara Croft has been gaming’s sex symbol since she was first revealed however many years ago. And since then, the formula has pretty much been Boobs + Action + Fanservice = Tomb Raider. Which, while effective, is a pretty juvenile approach.

Tomb Raider ‘13 does away with that whole notion, however. Lara’s still a gorgeous human specimen, but there’s no lingering shot of her ass as she cavorts around the environment. There’s no cutscene where she hops into the shower. No shot of her lying on the beach in a bikini. No ham-fisted romance subplot. No one-liners or catch-phrases.

Instead of glorifying Lara Croft, Tomb Raider ‘13 almost does a complete 180, opting instead to brutalize her. I don’t think I’ve winced this much watching a protagonist die since I discovered that the player character in Fallout 3 was subject to the same disgusting dismemberments as every other creature in the Capitol Wasteland. Over the course of the game, Lara gets a stake through her side, a gash on her arm, punched in the face, leered at very threateningly by a creepy captor, her leg caught in a bear trap, and that’s just what I can remember off the top of my head.

Again, though, Crystal Dynamics shows maturity. The game doesn’t revel in Lara’s bloody struggles nor does it apologize for them. A lesser game (one written by a dude, probably) would either 1) veer toward torture porn in its depiction of Lara’s struggles, or 2) pull its punches and avoid having the female lead undergo any real punishment. Lara definitely gets beat up, both by the environment and by other people. But instead of saying “HEY LOOK AT HOW EDGY WE ARE FOR BEING VIOLENT TO A WOMAN,” the game says, “Look at how this chick overcame these horrible experiences to become the character you know and love.”

Later: Lara’s transformation.

Tomb Raider is a Good Game

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 12:14:54 -0700

If the characters in the Assassin’s Creed games moved half as fluidly as Lara Croft in the new Tomb Raider, I’d buy every game in the series right the hell now.